I don't think it is much of a stretch to assert that the vast majority of code in the world that accomplishes important business goals is not "high performance" and in most cases doesn't need to be "high performance". So this is not really addressing the main point of the comment it is replying to.
> medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches
Those are all high performance areas of coding that would require great skill to execute correctly. Aside from medical devices, they all require a lot of concurrency and real-time processing in the case of air traffic control and phone switches. They are practically the definition of high performance programming.
No, if there is a definition of "high performance" in colloquial use, it's number crunching on a supercomputer e.g. weather forecasting and so on. Guess what, thats a very important application of computing, and once again, rock stars are notable only for their absence.
